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Kevin Spacey Dropped From All The Money In The World

Jeff Sneider at Tracking Board reports that Kevin Spacey is being dropped from Ridley Scott’s new film All The Money In The World. In an unprecedented move for a movie that’s set to debut in a month, Mr. Scott has dropped Mr. Spacey for Christopher Plummer, playing the role of J. Paul Getty. Reshoots have already started.

This is an unheard of move. For a studio to sink money in reshoots for a film that is so close to being released speaks volumes to the heat that Kevin Spacey is facing thanks to numerous allegations of sexual abuse since at least the 1980’s.

What people should not be doing is praising Sony for this move. Let’s be honest here. This move to drop Mr. Spacey was due to money and money alone. If they have to spend more to reshoot the scenes Mr. Spacey was in just to make sure he’s not in the movie, as well as making sure the press for the film is not centered on the accusations against him, they’re making a smart business move and nothing more.

This really begs the question of why people like Mr. Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Sheen, Bill O’Reilly, and others of their ilk, are allowed to continue with their horrendous actions at all. While I am not one to believe that every single accusation leveled against these people and others are all necessarily true, the sheer amount of accusations would lead one to believe the simple truth that when there’s smoke, there’s fire. It’s a sad world we live in where a company would rather pay people hush money for actions done by people that may make that company a lot of money instead of going out of their way to make sure this behavior doesn’t happen in the first place.

When you hear stories like this about someone in power, you ultimately hear that their behavior was an open secret in the industry they worked in. I think of that bit on Family Guy in the video below. If behavior like this was known by such a large amount of people, why didn’t anyone with power do anything about it? Simple. To studio heads, it was business. They felt they could save more money with non-disclosure agreements than letting their gift horses face legal trouble.

When it comes to something like sexual assault, sexual abuse, discrimination, anything that allows a person in power to manipulate people that are below them in the food chain for their own gain, companies would do well to make sure that from this moment forward, people feel comfortable bringing accusations such as the ones Mr. Spacey is currently facing forward. As a consumer, I’m going to look more favorably on companies that nipped a problem in the bud right away instead of waiting decades to do so. No matter how talented Kevin Spacey is as an actor, and let’s face it, he’s one hell of an actor, if even a tenth of the accusations leveled against him are true, he should have faced jail time, not hoping his next film would bring him an Oscar nomination.